Reciprocal Links, Cassettes, VCR’s – It’s Time to Let it Go!

Let’s face it, some people are still stuck in the past. What I still find perplexing is the fact that to this day we are still getting sp@m laden reciprocal link requests from other companies using the same generic cover letters. For those who still believe in off-topic links in hordes to improve search engine rankings, I hate to break it to you, but the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the bogey man have something to tell you in 2008, it’s time to come back to reality and let the past go.

On behalf of the millions of people who are still submitting reciprocal link requests on a regular basis, this is a request from the rest of us who are inhabitants of the new millenium to those who are still using 8 tracks, cassettes, VCR’s, Laser discs, monochrome monitors or boom boxes to wake up, smell the coffee and get busy creating value and making link-worthy content instead.

Instead of kicking and screaming in 2008 in denial of the present and yearning to want to watch episodes of Knight Rider, see a Ratt or Poison concert (80’s big hair band’s if it was before your time) or actually get a high ranking site to link to your spammy pages, there are no short cuts in search engine optimization, at least not ones that produce long-term effects.

If you think the Google-Bot is asleep behind the wheel, think again. From what I hear, G has been training their new second generation bots with secret martial arts training and has quite an impressive array of victories over those who refuse to give up their mullets and still employing SEO styles from the early nineties (you know who you are).

How many times a day do you delete the infamous chain mail template “Dear Webmaster, I visited your site and liked the contents so would like to propose link exchange partnership with your site. As you probably already know, link popularity is a major factor in getting a site noticed by the search engines and getting traffic onto that site. An additional link would help both you and us to get more traffic”. Sorry, but I will have to pass on this one, that is definitely the type of traffic I think we all can afford to live without.

Just in case you have this template and you are still using it, let me offer you a word of advice;

1st – It is spam, no matter how you cut it.
2nd -It annoys people so cut it out already.
3rd – If you spent more time focusing on creating quality content instead, people would want to link to you, not the other way around.

So, on behalf of the millions of us that are up to here (motions hand up to eyebrows) with tragic fabricated sob stories from complete strangers (with a revolving identity crisis ) that want to transfer millions of dollars into your bank account (yea right) enough is enough. I know that spam filters can’t catch everything which is why this is a petition to “just let it go”.